[Why is the UN concerned with what its employees' spouses are up to?]
The recruitment process was gruelling. It wasn't the number of candidates applying: the job requires a very specific set of skills, and you expected only a few people in the world to apply. You placed the vacancy advertisement in the Economist, Wall Street Journal and other prestigious publications. Those selected for interview flew in from all corners of the earth, attracted by your organisation's reputation and the excellent salary on offer. And after all that, your perfect candidate turns you down because her husband can't get a work permit.
This is a scenario which sounds increasingly familiar to HR recruiters and headhunters worldwide. Not yet having an exotic foreign partner, I only realised the extent of the issue when I started working on it at the UN Dual Career and Staff Mobility Programme. Curiosity led me to see how other organisations in other sectors deal with the interlinked issues of staff mobility, dual careers and spouse employment.
When people in recruitment talk of "staff mobility", they are referring to the ability to move current or potential employees from their present place of work and residence to another. "Dual career" issues are those surrounding couples where both partners want to work, and "spouse employment" describes the challenge of the employee's spouse finding a job in the new location.
This stuff is big business. Specialist companies such as Cartus and GMAC Global Relocation Services (current slogan: "The World is Our Hometown") are doing rather nicely from consulting on and even handling their clients' global reassignments, and Ernst & Young sponsors the Institute for Global Mobility, where "Global Mobility Professionals" come together and discuss strategic trends and solutions.
Immigration lawyers are "Global Mobility Professionals" too. They are important because all this moving around of workers and their families takes place in a legally restrictive environment, the restrictions coming in the form of work permits, quotas, visa requirements and suchlike. Even members of supranational efforts such as the European Union largely apply their own rules on the sensitive issues of immigration, employment and nationality.
As with asylum these issues touch people deeply, and the ways in which countries legislate on the subject is very interest and sometimes quite revealing of social and political outlooks and trends. Here are some of my favourites:
A male ancestor in your family born on the Italian peninsula in the 19th century gives you a great chance of obtaining Italian citizenship (and hence the right to live and work in 27 EU countries). It doesn't even matter if he was born before Italy came into being as a country: if he was alive at the country's birth in 1861 he became a subject of the Kingdom of Italy, with the concomitant right to pass down that privilege.
Sources: Italian citizenship law of 5th February 1992 (in Italian)
Only a few quick formalities stand between a foreign bride of a Basotho man and a Lesotho passport. Women cannot confer Basotho citizenship on their foreign husbands through marriage.
Source: Constitution of Lesotho
Free movement of workers in the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) is more heavily based on one's profession than in the European Union, on which CARICOM is largely modelled. Musicians and Cricketers are some of the professions most free to move and work around the Caribbean.
Source: Caribbean Community Free Movement of Skilled Persons Act 1997 (Jamaica)